Ice Cream Sandwich Cookie Love

Found these amazing little cookie treats on one of the first food blogs I actually trolled shamelessly while entering the food bloggin world...Smitten Kitchen. Over Christmas I made a bunch of the cookies on her site and they were amazing. But since I've been working on perfecting cupcakes lately...cookie recipes have languished unloved.

So when I saw these on a blog crawl the other day...I thought OMG must make these. Especially when she says they work wonderfully as a top and bottom for an ice cream sandwich. Say no more. I have some Marianne's Kahlua Crunch ice cream in the freezer just dying to be paired up with some fudgy brownie cookies and we are grilling tonite with friends, so these will be the welcome dessert.



The dough was easy enough, I read enough of the comments on the SK website for this recipe to know to add the flour in batches as a few people had problems with their dough not being sticky and too crumbly.


I also split the dough and added espresso extract to it for some fudgy coffee cookies in case I didn't use them all for the ice cream sandwiches.

Got the cookie cutters ready while the dough was chilling, and I was ready to go.


The first batch was the espresso since it was smaller. I baked about a minute too long..the chocolate ones are hard to tell when done. I'm so used to cupcakes!

The 2nd batch I cooked a little less, learning from the first. Both had great flavor..the espresso in the first was barely noticeable which was nice, it just gave the cookies a bit of a rich depth that the 2nd did not have. But both were amazingly chocolately with a fudgy chewy texture. I didn't make them quite as thick as SK did but I could see how those would be even better for biting and chewing.



These are the perfect spring into summer food..I demand you try them almost immediately. Yum!!!

Brownie Roll-Out Cookies
From SmittenKitchen

3 cups all-purpose flour
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1 cup lightly salted butter, softened
1 1/2 cups sugar
2 large eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
2/3 cup unsweetened cocoa

Preheat oven at 350 degrees. Whisk dry flour, salt and baking powder in bowl and set aside. Mix butter, sugar, eggs, vanilla and cocoa in mixer. Gradually add flour mixture, and mix until smooth. Wrap in plastic and chill for at least one hour.

Roll out cookie dough on floured counter. Cut into desired shapes, brushing extra deposits of flour off the top. (It does disappear once baked, though, so don’t overly fret if they go into the oven looking white.) Bake on a parchment-lined baking sheet for 8 to 11 minutes (the former for 1/8-inch thick cookies, the latter for 1/4-inch cookies) until the edges are firm and the centers are slightly soft and puffed.

Transfer to a wire rack to cool.



Mara Notes: I halved the recipe and used a little more cocoa powder for fun. Split the dough and added espresso extract to it for those non-sandwich cookies. For the 1/2 recipe, it's only 1 stick of butter and I used unsalted. I used a mix of Hershey's and Scharffen-Berger unsweetened cocoa.

By the way...homemade ice cream sandwiches? Hard to make..and hard to eat. But SO amazingly GOOD, pronounced a hit by better half and our dinner buddies. Worth the extensive mess--next time I will try chilling a plate first and the cookies then building the sandwiches.